Veggie Tales:​Memoirs From a Meatless Utopia

January 5th, -- “We are going to Kansas.” It is 1856, five years prior to the Civil War when vegetarian activists were making their way to the free state stronghold of Kansas. One of them was Miriam Davis Colt, a schoolteacher and her family who abandoned upstate New York to establish a meatless commune on the Midwestern plains. Similar in style to other utopian ventures of the nineteenth century, such as the Transcendentalist community “Brook Farm,” in Salem (immortalized by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1852 novel, The Blithedale Romance), and Amos Alcott’s “Fruitlands”, a vegetarian communal farming experiment in Harvard, Massachusetts, established in 1840, the Kansas Emigration Company, of which the Colt family were members, followed the vision of British vegetarian leader Henry S. Clubb. Clubb wanted to build a city of most healthful living, an octagon community of eight-sided homes, near Fort Scott, eighty miles south of Kansas City - a distance that would effectively remove members from the sins of slavery, alcohol, and animal consumption.

The Colt’s arrival in Kansas was met with bitter disappointment, the romance of the utopian “fairy land” quickly replaced by the harsh realities of Midwestern life on the prairie. Company owners had squandered money and families were left destitute and exposed. Penniless and heavy of heart, Colt and her family slowly made their way back to the East Coast. Her husband and three-year old son, Willie, fell ill and died on the return journey. As they burned with fever, Colt prays, “O, God, forsake us not utterly!” Colt and her daughter Mema finish the journey alone.

Went to Kansas holds Colt’s memoir, a last attempt at literary success in hopes of financing her broken family. Our copy is a first edition, printed in 1862 by ardent abolitionist and animal rights advocate Lotus Ingalls. Sometime in the 1950s, the book came into the possession of the historian E.G. Phelps, who used the volume to research the lives of the Neosho Indians. Phelps marked pages where Colt refers to Neosho customs. “I feel that here I am in the charnel house of the red men’s bones!” she writes in the heat of mid-July, “for all around can be seen the monuments of the Indian’s graves.” Colt observes Neosho burial rituals with a combination of fear and envy of their ability to survive on the plains, as she grapples with fear for her own family’s life. “If it is an Indian of note, his pony is slain, and it, and all that belongs to him, share with him his grave, and with him- his heaven,” she records. Phelps apparently donated the copy to a used bookstore in 1952 where it was sold for $5. Marginalia penciled throughout the text denotes the book’s journey from private collections to public libraries, passing hand to hand for over a century and a half. Went to Kansas reminds us of the trials and tribulations of early vegetarian pioneers who came to Kansas in pursuit of an elusive dream It also documents the singular bravery and perseverance of people in general who hoped for a fresh start in the American Midwest.

Hallie Lucas

To ​see what Hallie Lucas found out about Miriam Colt's memoir​Click on the link below